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Aside from this "New Menace" however, Comrade Emilian Yaroslavsky, President and Founder of the Union of the Militant Godless, had satisfactory progress to report. Off English presses and from the pens of Lord & Lady Passfield of Passfield Corner (who write under their old names of Beatrice and Sidney Webb) has recently come Soviet Communism, teeming with encouraging news of the work of Godless Yaroslavsky. According to Lord & Lady Passfield, the 9,000 "cells" or local organizations of the Godless in 1929 have now grown to 70,000. Adult membership has passed 5,000,000 and more than 2,000,000 are members of the Junior Godless.
"The priests of the Greek Orthodox Church are to be seen in the cities walking the streets in their religious garb, and in the country working in their gardens," write the English Lord & Lady. "Icons may still be seen without concealment in many a peasant izba, even in the collective farms. . . . [However] by an alteration of the law made in 1929, any public propaganda of religion apart from services and sermons in church is made a penal offense." Finally they quote an authority on Russia as saying, "At least half the population is already unchurched"—i.e., 82,500,000 Soviet citizens are still "churched."
In stirring up the police to inflict upon unchurched preachers of religion the full penalty of Soviet law, the Godless are especially active. Last week they boasted at their Jubilee of fresh success in a Western Siberian village. They have at last got its "chief evangelist," P. M. Golofast, sentenced to ten years in jail along with two minor evangelists, jailed respectively for two and five years.
Roman Catholic missionaries in Russia today are under the direct and exceedingly discreet patronage of His Holiness Pope Pius XI. At the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Manhattan, a prelate declared last week: "No one except Rome knows just who is doing what and where in Russia. If it were known, the Soviets would chop their heads off. As for such churches as are open in Russia, they are only to make it appear to tourists that there is no persecution." Because Pius XI is considered by the Godless their personal and potent foe in the great battle for Russian souls, Godless poster-cartoons of the Supreme Pontiff are particularly ill-tempered, Jewish and Orthodox leaders being let off more easily (see cut, p. 19). The Baptists, no longer as active in Russia as they were for years after the Revolution, have been hit by Depression and their Orthodox rivals now smugly opine that the Russian people like "something warmer and more colorful" than Protestantism.
Russia's militant Godless campaign against all gods and all faiths. Excruciating is their stage skit Buddha-on-the-Telephone. Expensively established by Tsardom in St. Petersburg, and tolerated by Communism in Leningrad for visiting religionists, are a beauteous Moslem mosque and an elaborately carved Buddhist temple. Saintly-appearing priests of Buddha may be seen lost in scripture-reading or meditation and mechanically spinning their prayer wheels while tourists, Soviet ragamuffins and even stray dogs wander in & out unheeded.